I took some time off this summer to catch up on spending time with family, reading, watching TV. I hadn’t updated my blog in a while so I figured it was time.

I discovered HBO’s Game of Thrones, merely by chance to be honest, I think one of my regular news sites had a posting about being able to watch the first 15 minutes of their new show for free and since I really loved Rome (and was pissed off that it was cancelled too early) I thought I would check it out. The 15 minute preview was really well done and so I invested some time in watching the entire season. Near the end of the season I bought the books and starting reading them and was seriously hooked. I hadn’t read any fantasy novels since high-school/college with the Dragonlance series so it was nice to get back into 1) reading 2) reading in a genre that I had forgotten about. During summer I read all the books including GRRM’s new book. The new book I got digitally and was actually surprised how well reading on a tablet/ereader would be. I expected (like a lot of people do initially) that reading on the screen would not be the same but in many ways it was better as the reader I used managed bookmarks, it was easier to take the tablet around than a bulky 1000 page book and it was easy to review and find parts within the story that I needed to re-read. I can see eReaders being the future, something I never expected until I enjoyed reading a great book on one.

I also managed to pick up Coalitions End by Karen Traviss, which is the 4th Gears of War book based off the video game. I enjoyed all her other books so it was easy to get into this one. It ties in really well to where the 3rd and last? game starts of, to be released on XBOX360 tomorrow. I’m a huge Gears fan so I’m really looking forward to going through the game story with friends and playing online. Normally I wouldn’t really considering reading a video-game tie-in book but the characters and world created by Epic are so engrossing and Traviss has a great style of writing that it was easy to get reeled in. I recommend her books if you are interested in reading something a little different.

Wow I have been lazy and haven’t updated my blog for a while. I finally got my Viewsonic gTablet and it’s a pretty decent device. I found it really difficult to put on a screen protector (to be honest I’ve never had good luck putting on any screen protectors on any of my devices). With the screen on the gTablet being so big it was really difficult to get the screen protector on straight and without little bits of lint and misc under the film.

Recently some rom developers managed to get Honeycomb onto the device which is what I’m running right now. It works pretty well really, my biggest complaint is that flash doesn’t work yet. The libraries for Honeycomb are cobbled together so that’s likely why but a large portion of the OS and device work well (hardware acceleration, wifi, browsing, google apps like gmail and the market). It’s a shame that Viewsonic basically abandoned the device but thankfully so much of it is unlocked that it’s very easy to put new ROMS on it (and it has such an active community) that it makes up for the lack of support. The fact that it’s less than 1/2 the price of the next true Honeycomb tablet makes it easier to ignore the quirks of the device as well.

I finished Crackdown 2 on XBox, it was a pretty big disappointment mostly because I loved the first game so much. I found climbing in the game to be a lot more frustrating and buggy. Things that I know I could climb in the first game were impossible to climb in the second. The lack of story in the first game was annoying but the second game had even less of a story. The character progression seemed a lot less fun too, they added more orbs (because more is better right?) but it just made the progression a lot less fun. I never felt the sense of accomplishment that the first game had when you ‘leveled up’.

I started playing a new Indie game called Terraria. It’s pretty simplistic but a lot of fun. It follows the vein of your typical dungeon crawling Diablo/Larn/Hack game but a lot of the game follows the new genre Minecraft type game. So far it’s pretty addicting but sadly it’s Steam enabled which means I have to be online (and not at work) to play it.

I’ve been out for a while, I haven’t done any real software development outside of work for a while.. just taking a break.

I bought Mafia 2 on Steam the other week which was on sale, I hadn’t finished or played a game for a while so it was nice to take a break.

The other day a friend from work had me look at his cheap Android tablet. It was a cheap iPad ripoff from China but being a geek I like gadgets so I took the device home to play with it. My friend wanted to get Honeycomb on the thing but 1) Honeycomb isn’t officially released 2) there is NO XDA support for the device 3) the device is pretty slow. It has a decent clocked CPU (1ghz) but only has 256 MB of memory and that 1ghz processor is the old Arm11 which from what I understand is slow and inefficient. Nonetheless it was a fun experimentation and gave me a new appreciation for tablet computers. Now if they would finally come down in price.

It seems to me that all tablet computers are overpriced. For the amount the cheapest high end device that is being sold you could get a pretty great netbook (or if you shopped around a fully usable Laptop. Sure you could argue that a tablet is a lot more portable but I can guarantee that the laptop is also a lot better at doing computer type things. It’s likely the ‘it’ factor that tablets have that is driving their perceived value up.

With the release of Honeycomb there will be a lot of competition though so with luck we’ll able to pay a lot less for even more powerful device before the end of 2011. Then it will become a matter of “is there enough tablet specific software to make the purchase a lot more attractive”.